Kelly Herdman
Narrative Sequence Paper
Joseph Griffen
This morning, after waking up for the umpteenth time in my special room for special people with special problems, I got a phone call from my sister who had fled the scene of Dad’s death. Wondering if I was ok, telling me that she was. How ironic it is, that despite me being the one with the ‘mental disability’ she is the one in pieces.
When I was young, Mom tried to send me to school, where I was met by an aid each morning. She was a nice lady named Beth, who tried tirelessly to help me to speak. Downs Syndrome doesn’t generally include the symptom of being speechless, so there was no known reason to them why I wasn’t talking, or making any noise at all. The truth was that I spoke at night, trying to sounds of the letters in my mouth, and the words they formed, but no matter how hard I try, they always sound like mush. It embarrassed me, so I never let anyone hear it. Beth told my mother that while lack of speech was an unusual characteristic, lack of hearing was not. But Mom had given up on my at that point.
The night after hearing this, when I thought I should some how tell her than I was able to make noise, Mom came into my room to tuck me into bed. Usually, she read me a story quietly, although she was right next to me, and after straining to hear what she was saying, I would give up and allow myself to drift to sleep. This night, however, Mom came in, sat on my bed per usual, but bore no book in her hands. She spoke to the lamp beside my bed, rather than looking directly at me, but she spoke in a clear voice that for once I was able to hear.
“Since you can’t speak, I know I can trust you to hold my secrets,” She began. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, because as long as I could remember, Mom had never made much effort to be close to me. She was always willing to let Clarissa babysit me, or hand me off to the aide.
“I was raped, a long time ago. Your sister- well, half sister, technically- is the living result of the incident. And I don’t know how to love her because I can’t look at her without thinking about it,” she said this in a rush, so I had to concentrate to keep up. Clarissa was at a friend’s house for the night, and Dad working late, so she spoke loudly and freely. More freely than I had ever seen.
She continued for nearly an hour. She told me how she had suffered out in somewhere called ‘Laplin’ and how she had married a man who had promised to help her. She spoke of her departure from this man and his promises with little remorse, although from what she had tried to teach me, it didn’t sound like good manners to me. She told me how she had wanted to start over, a redo, and had left ‘Laplin’ with Clarissa in her arms, catching bus after bus after train after plane, and had some how had ended up with a new husband, a new life, and me.
“I thought this would be everything I wanted. But Clarissa is a living, walking, talking reminder of Laplin and I don’t know how to love her like a mother should love her child,” she finished, a little more quietly. She seemed ashamed to say this, but had spoken it aloud nevertheless. She looked around to glance at the clock, and decided it was time for me to sleep.
That was the first of these encounters. Every time we were alone, she would make my bedtime story into a monologue. As I grew older, and bedtime stories became too childish, she still would enter my room before bed, and tell me her secrets. After listening to her speak about her struggles and her apparent release to be able to tell someone all of these things, I made the choice to not speak. By not speaking, I could not only have a relationship with my mother, but relieved me of the responsibility to quite literally answer to anyone.
For two years, I listened to my mother. I listened because it was one of the few things she said that I could hear. And I listened because as I began to know more about her life, the more I saw the potential to be just like her in my sister, Clarissa.
Clarissa was always longing for my mother to speak to her, perhaps to have the very relationship I had effortlessly with our mother. As she grew, I saw the demented, abnormal reactions she had, the same one that I witnessed in my mother in present day, and the ones I heard about in my mother’s stories about her past. It scared me, to watch as the similarities grew stronger.
One day, we went to visit a friend of my mother’s. Clarissa hung to every word my mother said out loud, whether it was to her or simply a remark to no one. When we arrived, Clarissa was assigned to entertain me, while Mom caught up with her old friend. After some time, I needed to go to the bathroom, so Clarissa escorted me. Once there, she noticed the earwax buildup in my sub-par ears, and began to attack them with a Q-tip. I didn’t want to tell her to stop- I couldn’t let Mom know that her secrets were safe not because I didn’t have the choice, but because I had made the choice to keep them. Clarissa dug harder and harder until I had no more self-control to stay silent. I let a scream of pain escape in hope that Mom would think it was Clarissa. She came to discover the source of the emotion, and realized that it had been her silent son who had screamed. Who had made noise, and who had the potential to spill her deepest, darkest secrets. That in one single scrape, the daughter she had been trying to be kind to and to love ad snuffed out the single outlet she had in this life.
After that day, Mom never came into my room. Her outlet was no longer foolproof and therefore unsafe. She went through the motions she usually made if front of the rest of our family to pay attention to me, but our previous bond was extinguished.
One day I saw her out on the porch through a window, looking like she was enjoying herself. The expression on her face was the same as it was when she used to talk to me in my room, and she seemed to be talking. I cracked open the door, wanting to hear, wanting to listen, and wanting to be apart of her life once more, only to scare a cat that had been nearby, and rouse my mother’s attention. A few weeks later, I wandered into my room to find all of my things in boxes. It made me mad, for things to be different, and I began to unpack, putting things back where I thought they had been.
“Stop that, Jeremy,” a voice commanded. I turned to find my mother standing in the doorway, casting a shadow over me so that I couldn’t see her face. Her voice was almost unrecognizable, though.
“You’re moving to a new home tomorrow. A place with other people like you, where people can look after you better than I can. And if you want any of your stuff to come with you, you’d better leave it packed up.” She turned and left, and I sat on the floor. I was struggling to understand. I hadn’t been bad, not on purpose at least. Where was I going? It was time to speak out, to tell Mom that I didn’t want this. Of course she didn’t know, but I needed to tell her. I had listened to her for so long, so would undoubtedly listen to me.
I found her on the front porch again, with that happy expression on her face. Instead of using the door this time, I crept to the window, and discovered her talking to a cat, the same one I had scared the last time I had spied on her. The cat was lapping up milk from the cap of the milk jug, and my mother, stroking it’s back, was talking to it like she talked to me. Freely, openly. Her secrets were as shallow as the milk in the cap, and suddenly it was clear. I had been replaced. Her outlet had been restored. This cat was her son’s replacement.
And once again, I made the choice to not speak. It was time to leave. It was exactly what I wanted, and clearly, it was the solution to my mother’s problem.
Many years had passed since then. Soon after I was moved into my new room, my mother had disappeared. Dad and Clarissa came to visit me, but really to figure out if she had been here. But the nurses told them she hadn’t been to see me since I moved in.
The damage it had done to Clarissa was evident just by looking at her. Before she could open her mouth to confirm it, she had the look of someone in pieces. From that day on, she stopped growing, stopped living. The neglect that had occurred all these years from Mom constantly being unable to love her like a child she could have planned on had built up and spilled over the cause permanent damage.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Book Review and Narrative Sequence
First off, I will start with my reflection of the book. I think the assignment was to finish the book, which I had done a while back so that is what I will reflect on, regardless.
I cannot decide if I liked this book or not. It was an intriguing read, and I finished it within a day, so it was clearly not a complicated read. However, the story line was such a wandering unpaved road of plot that I was just increasingly frustrated with the story as it progressed. Although I thought the book ended in the most not-cliché way, I would have rather seen more of a conclusion, more ends tied up, than what we got.
I felt like the author had poor planning for her novel. There were so many open routes to follow in the first few chapters, and even more as the book when on. She could have given a huge role to Jeremy, who basically stands only as a metaphor for the failed attempt at a normal marriage for Olivia. There was also Henrick, that Clarissa could have learned to love and be normal with, but instead there was an awkward cover-up attempt of brother-sisterly bonding and they part ways. Vida seems to write the story as it drifts into her brain, rather than writing out a guide for her details to follow.
That being said, the book has the potential to be very deep. Some of the characters and descriptions seem pointless or unnecessary on the surface, but upon further inspection play a key role in foreshadowing Clarissa’s future. Constantly, the book gives in-depth descriptions of objects or scenes that Clarissa sees but does not seem to take any meaning from. These briefly mentioned details tell us more about Clarissa’s character- about how she is prepared to tell her reader every nitty-gritty detail of her life and life journey. That perhaps she has missed details in the past, and is making up for it now by accounting for everything there is to account for. And while she may not interpret a deeper meaning to these details (after all, who stands next to a door in their daily life and thinks about how it could be a metaphor for their ability to carry on with their life journey?), the reader can take the in-depth, closer analysis of every inch of her description and find themselves with a pretty good idea of where she is at in her life, what might be coming, and why everything is the way it is with her.
Alrighty, so for the second part of this blog I believe we are supposed to get going with some sort of rough draft attempt for our Narrative Sequence papers. I haven’t really decided on what I want to do, but here is a narrative of Jeremy, the brother with Downs Syndrome:
Jeremy
This morning, after waking up for the umpteenth time in my special room for special people with special problems, I got a phone call from my sister who had fled the scene of Dad’s death. Wondering if I was ok, telling me that she was. How ironic it is, that despite me being the one with the ‘mental disability’ she is the one in pieces.
When I was young, Mom tried to send me to school, where I was met by an aid each morning. She was a nice lady named Beth, who tried tirelessly to help me to speak. Downs Syndrome doesn’t generally include the symptom of being speechless, so there was no known reason to them why I wasn’t talking, or making any noise at all. The truth was that I spoke at night, trying to sounds of the letters in my mouth, and the words they formed, but no matter how hard I try, they always sound like mush. Beth told my mother that while lack of speech was an unusual characteristic, lack of hearing was not. But Mom had given up on my at that point.
The night after hearing this, when I thought I should some how tell her than I was able to make noise, Mom came into my room to tuck me into bed. Usually, she read me a story quietly, although she was right next to me, and after straining to hear what she was saying, I would give up and allow myself to drift to sleep. This night, however, Mom came in, sat on my bed per usual, but bore no book in her hands. She spoke to the lamp beside my bed, rather than looking directly at me, but she spoke in a clear voice that for once I was able to hear.
“Since you can’t speak, I know I can trust you to hold my secrets,” She began. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, because as long as I could remember, Mom had never made much effort to be close to me. She was always willing to let Clarissa babysit me, or hand me off to the aide.
“I was raped, a long time ago. Your sister- well, half sister, technically- is the living result of the incident. And I don’t know how to love her because I can’t look at her without thinking about it,” she said this in a rush, so I had to concentrate to keep up. Clarissa was at a friend’s house for the night, and Dad working late, so she spoke loudly and freely. More freely than I had ever seen.
She continued for nearly an hour. She told me how she had suffered out in somewhere called ‘Laplin’ and how she had married a man who had promised to help her. She spoke of her departure from this man and his promises with little remorse, although from what she had tried to teach me, it didn’t sound like good manners to me. She told me how she had wanted to start over, a redo, and had left ‘Laplin’ with Clarissa in her arms, catching bus after bus after train after plane, and had some how had ended up with a new husband, a new life, and me.
“I thought this would be everything I wanted. But Clarissa is a living, walking, talking reminder of Laplin and I don’t know how to love her like a mother should love her child,” she finished, a little more quietly. She seemed ashamed to say this, but had spoken it aloud nevertheless. She looked around to glance at the clock, and decided it was time for me to sleep.
That was the first of these encounters. Every time we were alone, she would make my bedtime story into a monologue. As I grew older, and bedtime stories became too childish, she still would enter my room before bed, and tell me her secrets. After listening to her speak about her struggles and her apparent release to be able to tell someone all of these things, I made the choice to not speak. By not speaking, I could not only have a relationship with my mother, but relieved me of the responsibility to quite literally answer to anyone.
For two years, I listened to my mother. I listened because it was one of the few things she said that I could hear. And I listened because as I began to know more about her life, the more I saw the potential to be just like her in my sister, Clarissa.
Clarissa was always longing for my mother to speak to her, perhaps to have the very relationship I had effortlessly with our mother. As she grew, I saw the demented, abnormal reactions she had, the same one that I witnessed in my mother in present day, and the ones I heard about in my mother’s stories about her past. It scared me, to watch as the similarities grew stronger.
One day, we went to visit a friend of my mother’s. Clarissa hung to every word my mother said out loud, whether it was to her or simply a remark to no one. When we arrived, Clarissa was assigned to entertain me, while Mom caught up with her old friend. After some time, I needed to go to the bathroom, so Clarissa escorted me. Once there, she noticed the earwax buildup in my sub-par ears, and began to attack them with a Q-tip. I didn’t want to tell her to stop- I couldn’t let Mom know that her secrets were safe not because I didn’t have the choice, but because I had made the choice to keep them. Clarissa dug harder and harder until I had no more self-control to stay silent. I let a scream of pain escape in hope that Mom would think it was Clarissa. She came to discover the source of the emotion, and realized that it had been her silent son who had screamed. Who had made noise, and who had the potential to spill her deepest, darkest secrets. That in one single scrape, the daughter she had been trying to be kind to and to love ad snuffed out the single outlet she had in this life.
After that day, Mom never came into my room.
I cannot decide if I liked this book or not. It was an intriguing read, and I finished it within a day, so it was clearly not a complicated read. However, the story line was such a wandering unpaved road of plot that I was just increasingly frustrated with the story as it progressed. Although I thought the book ended in the most not-cliché way, I would have rather seen more of a conclusion, more ends tied up, than what we got.
I felt like the author had poor planning for her novel. There were so many open routes to follow in the first few chapters, and even more as the book when on. She could have given a huge role to Jeremy, who basically stands only as a metaphor for the failed attempt at a normal marriage for Olivia. There was also Henrick, that Clarissa could have learned to love and be normal with, but instead there was an awkward cover-up attempt of brother-sisterly bonding and they part ways. Vida seems to write the story as it drifts into her brain, rather than writing out a guide for her details to follow.
That being said, the book has the potential to be very deep. Some of the characters and descriptions seem pointless or unnecessary on the surface, but upon further inspection play a key role in foreshadowing Clarissa’s future. Constantly, the book gives in-depth descriptions of objects or scenes that Clarissa sees but does not seem to take any meaning from. These briefly mentioned details tell us more about Clarissa’s character- about how she is prepared to tell her reader every nitty-gritty detail of her life and life journey. That perhaps she has missed details in the past, and is making up for it now by accounting for everything there is to account for. And while she may not interpret a deeper meaning to these details (after all, who stands next to a door in their daily life and thinks about how it could be a metaphor for their ability to carry on with their life journey?), the reader can take the in-depth, closer analysis of every inch of her description and find themselves with a pretty good idea of where she is at in her life, what might be coming, and why everything is the way it is with her.
Alrighty, so for the second part of this blog I believe we are supposed to get going with some sort of rough draft attempt for our Narrative Sequence papers. I haven’t really decided on what I want to do, but here is a narrative of Jeremy, the brother with Downs Syndrome:
Jeremy
This morning, after waking up for the umpteenth time in my special room for special people with special problems, I got a phone call from my sister who had fled the scene of Dad’s death. Wondering if I was ok, telling me that she was. How ironic it is, that despite me being the one with the ‘mental disability’ she is the one in pieces.
When I was young, Mom tried to send me to school, where I was met by an aid each morning. She was a nice lady named Beth, who tried tirelessly to help me to speak. Downs Syndrome doesn’t generally include the symptom of being speechless, so there was no known reason to them why I wasn’t talking, or making any noise at all. The truth was that I spoke at night, trying to sounds of the letters in my mouth, and the words they formed, but no matter how hard I try, they always sound like mush. Beth told my mother that while lack of speech was an unusual characteristic, lack of hearing was not. But Mom had given up on my at that point.
The night after hearing this, when I thought I should some how tell her than I was able to make noise, Mom came into my room to tuck me into bed. Usually, she read me a story quietly, although she was right next to me, and after straining to hear what she was saying, I would give up and allow myself to drift to sleep. This night, however, Mom came in, sat on my bed per usual, but bore no book in her hands. She spoke to the lamp beside my bed, rather than looking directly at me, but she spoke in a clear voice that for once I was able to hear.
“Since you can’t speak, I know I can trust you to hold my secrets,” She began. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, because as long as I could remember, Mom had never made much effort to be close to me. She was always willing to let Clarissa babysit me, or hand me off to the aide.
“I was raped, a long time ago. Your sister- well, half sister, technically- is the living result of the incident. And I don’t know how to love her because I can’t look at her without thinking about it,” she said this in a rush, so I had to concentrate to keep up. Clarissa was at a friend’s house for the night, and Dad working late, so she spoke loudly and freely. More freely than I had ever seen.
She continued for nearly an hour. She told me how she had suffered out in somewhere called ‘Laplin’ and how she had married a man who had promised to help her. She spoke of her departure from this man and his promises with little remorse, although from what she had tried to teach me, it didn’t sound like good manners to me. She told me how she had wanted to start over, a redo, and had left ‘Laplin’ with Clarissa in her arms, catching bus after bus after train after plane, and had some how had ended up with a new husband, a new life, and me.
“I thought this would be everything I wanted. But Clarissa is a living, walking, talking reminder of Laplin and I don’t know how to love her like a mother should love her child,” she finished, a little more quietly. She seemed ashamed to say this, but had spoken it aloud nevertheless. She looked around to glance at the clock, and decided it was time for me to sleep.
That was the first of these encounters. Every time we were alone, she would make my bedtime story into a monologue. As I grew older, and bedtime stories became too childish, she still would enter my room before bed, and tell me her secrets. After listening to her speak about her struggles and her apparent release to be able to tell someone all of these things, I made the choice to not speak. By not speaking, I could not only have a relationship with my mother, but relieved me of the responsibility to quite literally answer to anyone.
For two years, I listened to my mother. I listened because it was one of the few things she said that I could hear. And I listened because as I began to know more about her life, the more I saw the potential to be just like her in my sister, Clarissa.
Clarissa was always longing for my mother to speak to her, perhaps to have the very relationship I had effortlessly with our mother. As she grew, I saw the demented, abnormal reactions she had, the same one that I witnessed in my mother in present day, and the ones I heard about in my mother’s stories about her past. It scared me, to watch as the similarities grew stronger.
One day, we went to visit a friend of my mother’s. Clarissa hung to every word my mother said out loud, whether it was to her or simply a remark to no one. When we arrived, Clarissa was assigned to entertain me, while Mom caught up with her old friend. After some time, I needed to go to the bathroom, so Clarissa escorted me. Once there, she noticed the earwax buildup in my sub-par ears, and began to attack them with a Q-tip. I didn’t want to tell her to stop- I couldn’t let Mom know that her secrets were safe not because I didn’t have the choice, but because I had made the choice to keep them. Clarissa dug harder and harder until I had no more self-control to stay silent. I let a scream of pain escape in hope that Mom would think it was Clarissa. She came to discover the source of the emotion, and realized that it had been her silent son who had screamed. Who had made noise, and who had the potential to spill her deepest, darkest secrets. That in one single scrape, the daughter she had been trying to be kind to and to love ad snuffed out the single outlet she had in this life.
After that day, Mom never came into my room.
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